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Postcolonial Preoccupations in Munshi Premchand's Karmabhumi

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Postcolonial Preoccupations in Munshi Premchand's Karmabhumi ISSN 2249-4529 Lapis Lazuli -An International Literary Journal (LLILJ) Vol.4 / NO.1 /Spring 2014 Colonial Outlook and Human Values: Postcolonial Preoccupations in Munshi Premchand’s Karmabhumi Ashish Kumar Abstract: Colonization has been an integral part of human culture and civilization. Indian society is not an exceptional case owing to the British inheritance and dominance upon the minds of youth. The colonial outlook is still perpetuating the roots of imperialism in India. Though the people have got political freedom; yet the strategies of imperialist are still twisting the cultural setup of indigenous people. Premchand has experienced all these means of meaning business only. According to him, the Lapis Lazuli -An International Literary Journal (LLILJ) ISSN 2249-4529 Vol.4/ NO.1/Spring 2014 URL of the Journal- http://pintersociety.com/ URL of the Issue: http://pintersociety.com/vol-4-no-1spring-2014/ © www.pintersociety.com 241 Colonial Outlook and Human Values: Postcolonial Preoccupations in Munshi Premchand’s Karmabhumi native people have lost their ideals and traditional values of humanity. They all are running after money owing to the impact of Western education. Youth is expecting only degrees not education; because the present norms of education have nothing to do with developing their characters. So they are facing frustrations and tedious problems in their lives. Moreover, the women have lost their faith in traditional rituals of marriage. They justify their freedom on the basis of Western ideologies of Freud and Darwin. This disruption of values has developed a spirit of resistance between the east and the west. The whole substance is the major part of Premchand’s Karmabhumi. It does not mean that Premchand has no respect for the western culture but he satirizes those norms of cultural setup which discard the human values and have become the means of perpetuating imperialism. Premchand’s fiction has its own relevance in the present age of globalization where colonial outlook has shaped itself according to changing life styles; but one must not think of its complete end. Premchand tries to highlight that part of colonization where there is a profound need of decolonization. The present paper seeks for the basic part of colonization and decolonization with reference to the changing paradigms of the present cultural setup. KEYWORDS: Colonization, Hybridization, Mimicry, Orientalism, ambivalent, globalization Every person in this world is colonized somewhere because he has certain systematized thoughts in his mind. Man, in other words, appears to have freedom, but is in custody of a cruel system everywhere. These chains belong to an immense and immanent social setup in which man lives and spends his time. Actually, man and this social structure are not two different things because a fish into the water and the water into the fish are not apparently separate. Instead, they are parts of a single phenomenon which appears to have dualism but there is not any actual duality. So, it is the spirit of the social or traditional 242 Lapis Lazuli -An International Literary Journal (LLILJ) phenomena which develops certain attitudes in the personality of a person. These attitudes actualized by a community, become the civilization or cultural heritage of that particular region. The people of that community consider that cultural heritage as a natural part of their life. They do not want any kind of disturbance with it. Any reaction to it becomes a resistance or a revolt to the oppositional part. Indian society has been developing by certain attitudes, values and morals for a long time. But all this has been affected by the political dominance of the British. Actually, all this was not only political but social, cultural and psychological also, which tried to dislocate the traditional heritage of this community. Premchand being a pure Indian writer had experienced all this, having the vision of his own ideal cultural values alive in him. So, he has highlighted the negative aspects of the British‟s dominance over India. At the very opening of the novel, Karmabhumi, the novelist satirizes the crucial process of western education which is only based upon the idea „business is business‟ wherein one has to pay for everything in the educational process. Nobody is free from it. The protagonist, Amarkant, has to run away from the school owing to the shortage of money to be paid in the form of school fees. This money is not being collected to cultivate ideal values among the students, but to exploit them and to perpetuate the roots of the cruel system. The following lines can be taken as a fit instance: “Even land taxes are probably not collected as ruthlessly as school fees are collected in our schools and colleges. They are not institutions for education, they are institutions for fines” (1). Thus, Premchand‟s works clearly explore the spirit of nationalism concerning the aspects of cultural and political fields. The British deliberately declared English as the national language of Indian society for their own benefits disrupting the native sources of communication. So, the Western education shaped the contemporary people‟s minds to such extent that they fo rgot their own cultural and social values. The modern education given to the Indians by that imperial process has led them to the Epicurean philosophy of „eat, drink and be merry‟. Having influenced by this education, the Indian 243 Colonial Outlook and Human Values: Postcolonial Preoccupations in Munshi Premchand’s Karmabhumi women themselves don‟t believe in the traditional rituals of marriage and consider it to be unnatural and obsolete propaganda. On the other hand, they continually believe in the Western ideology of marriage like “Live in Relationship” or the like. They justify their freedom on the basis of the Western thinkers including Freud and Darwin asserting “Survival of the fittest” and following the concept of “Libido”. They also put questions like “Is sex unreal?” breaking the traditional rituals of the Indian society. So, all this dislocation is the result of that Western education which is still in the minds of the colonized people having an enlarged image in their minds. By popularizing the standard of the Western education in the colonies, the imperialist rulers had been shaping the minds of the colonized masses, establishing a new form of capitalism in which the Indian or the colonized were being exploited under the strategy of their business. In this sense, capitalism and imperialism were not different things but two phases of a single project. Premchand is a brilliant novelist to understand the roots of the imperialistic system. So, he regarded the British as “Traders” who believed in utilitarian and inhuman activities for the sake of their business. He also depicts how the native people were forced to perpetuate this system by being the puppets in their hands. This approach of discussing the human beings as puppets under that system proves to be a kind of „Catharsis‟ for the colonized people having the feeling of decolonization. Here, Premchand‟s approach is similar to that of Frantz Fanon, who also thinks that the imperial process had been a brain-washing methodology over colonies which created inferiority complex among them. Then, there is a need to decolonize them from that strategy in which they have to live. Premchand focused upon the use of native things for this purpose. Drinking, women-dance in the marriages, and 244 Lapis Lazuli -An International Literary Journal (LLILJ) flirtation with girls have been the hallmarks of the Western education which had disintegrated the Indian values. The trend of friendship day is common to the Westerners, but it is in an ambiguous stage in India today. The colonized have come to a stage where they are neither Indian nor Western. This is the hybridization of the culture resulting from the impact of western education during the colonizing process. The school teachers themselves have become businessmen, who are bothered about fees and not about education or values. This changed attitude in teaching-learning process is a resistance to Indian Gurukul system, where teacher and taught have been builders of an ideal society, and where education goes to the students for the sake of good life and not for inculcating business life. This cultural resistance reminds the scholars of the theme of the novel A Passage to India, where friendship between the Indian and the British is depicted as an impossible and unsuccessful project because there is something in their cultural and social system that does not like this unity. The Western norms appear to be lacking in a framework and suitability viable for Indian cultural setup. This very scenario of encounter between the East and the West is being depicted by Premchand in the first chapter of the novel Karmabhumi. His philosophy sharply touches the minds of the people who are being colonized in this rat race of the westernization. Whether his appeal for changing this mode of society would be successful or not in the age of globalization in which one country has to depend on others is not clear. But Premchand obviously has revolted against the Western system of inhumanity, which to the Westerners is a routine course of doing and meaning business. He dismisses the trend of cutting the throat to win the competition, which the worldly wise and successful people, fashionably and cunningly and beguilingly, term as „cut-throat competition‟. Premchand, it seems, is able to see through this sharp practice. Premchand as human being has been influenced by the spell of the Arya Samaj, Gandhism and the Indian values, which, in a sense, can be seen in the personality of his ideal characters, who become 245 Colonial Outlook and Human Values: Postcolonial Preoccupations in Munshi Premchand’s Karmabhumi the heroes in his novels dismantling the Western ideology of doing business over upholding humanity.
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